And so did Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu as Rokuon-ji sits on part of his former estate. Rokuon-ji is a three story temple that contains the ashes of Buddha. The top two stories of the pavilion are covered with pure gold leaf.
The temple sits at the edge of a pond called KyÅko-chi (Mirror Pond).
It’s a beautiful sight indeed.
A perfect ending to our stay in Kyoto, which started off a little rough, but things are definitely getting brighter (no pun inteded) as we make our way farther south to Osaka for a couple of days.
Today we took a little day trip out to the city of Nara, in the Nara prefecture of Japan. The main draw of the city are the hundreds of tame deer that just roam the city streets. Tame that is unless you happen to be carrying some food with you.
They have become so acclimated to the city life…
…that they even obey the laws so that they don’t get tickets.
Other than the deer there are a few others sights to see such as TÅdai-ji…
…which is a great big Buddhist temple built to house a colossal bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana.
Just to give you an idea of how colossal it really is, each finger is about the same size as a human being. So ya, she’s a hefty one.
Before the sun went down we took a stroll through a nearby garden on the way back to the train.
Not many flowers were in bloom, but the changing colors of the leaves was still nice enough for a few photos.
Oh, and I almost forgot! On the way into the city we passed by a shop with these two guys kneading some dough with giant wooden mallets that was very impressive. Especially towards the end when one guy put down his mallet and started using his hands at double-speed, while his buddy (who he obviously trusts very much) kept walloping the dough with his mallet — also at double speed.
This morning we boarded a train to check out Fushimi Inari Taisha, which in case you couldn’t figure out from the name is a shrine of Inari located in the Fushimi ward of Kyoto. From the train station you can easily find your way to the shrine just by following the giant torri’s.
Up a few stairs and along the outer wall of the shrine were hundreds of ema (small wooden plaques on which Shinto worshipers write their prayers)…
…and below them were long bundles of origami ropes of different sizes, shapes, colors, and styles.
From the awning of the shrine hung bells with long sheets of cloth for worshipers to tug on after their donation and before their prayer.
Inari’s shrine is an important one, as he/she is responsible for fertility, rice and worldly success. It is for this reason that the grounds of the shrine are filled with millions of these torri snaking all over the mountian side. Each of these orange gates was donated by successful business men, merchants and manufacturers as their way to give back for what Inari gave them.
The gates start out really large at the foot of the mountain…
…and get slightly smaller as the elevation increases…
…until they split apart…
…forming long orange and black corridors.
Once you finally emerge from the halls-o-halloween, you will find smaller shrines with even smaller torri…
Naturally, the smaller the torri, the more you can fit on, near or around a shrine. There are so many torri they needed to create a large torri just to hold all the little torri!
Some of the other shrines strayed from the norm a bit, and were slightly more unique in their design. Some using different materials…
…others using different shapes…
…and others using different colors.
One thing is for sure, if there is one person the certainly deserves a few torri (if not their own shrine) it’s the owner of this vehicle who wins the award for worlds best parallel parker.
And worlds skinniest human bean too from the looks of it!
They must have melted themselves with water just so they could get out of the van.
Probably the dragon water…
…from Kiyomizu-dera.
Get this… that temple right there, is built entirely without a single screw or nail to hold it all together! How do ya like them mortis tenon joints!? Eat your heart out Norm Abram!
In addition, that platform that you can see all those people standing on, is where people used to literrally “take the plunge” and jump 13 meters to the ground below. If you survive, you are granted one wish. If not, well, maybe you should have wished for something else! Two hundred and thirty-four jumps were recorded in the Edo period and, of those, 85.4% survived. The practice is now prohibited. Drats. Those are pretty decent odds too!
I guess we’ll just resort to the more modern wish granting practices of hanging up an ema or two.
It’s sort of sad to see the temple get all of the attention when on a nearby hillside this deteriorating pagoda gets no love.
It’s still a very pretty structure. Maybe they used Elmers wood glue to put it together and that’s why nobody cares about it.
During our last trip to Japan in December of 2007, we primarily stuck to the Tokyo area (except for a day trip to Hakonne). This time we’re exploring some other cities in the south. For example, today we took the bullet train down to Kyoto.
Boy is that sucker fast!
As a quick aside: I just recently read the good news that California will soon be getting it’s very own high-speed train from SD to SF/SAC. Good move Cali! Trains are for sure THE BEST way to travel.
As our health is starting to stabilize, we can start to resume normal sight seeing. So today’s place of interest was NijÅ Castle. It’s a massive 275,000 square foot ancient palace smack dab in the middle of a bustling city. And it’s protected from invading city folk by a wide moat around the outer wall.
Once past the moat you can see that the palace is made up of two concentric rings of fortifications.
And inside the 2nd ring is Ninomaru Palace.
Photographs were not allowed inside of the palace, so you’ll just have to visit it yourself. But really quickly, a couple of cool facts…
The palace is built with a floating floor and each and every floor board squeaks when pressure is applied. This squeaky design is on purpose in order to alert the residents of any intruders. These days however as tourists pass through it sounds like there are millions of little birds trapped beneath the floor.
The shoguns of the Tokugawa family instructed all of the feudal lords from Western Japan to help build the castle, hence uniting much of Japan.
The rest of the castle ground are filled with various other buildings, and some amazing postcard-like gardens
Quite a magnificent piece of land. It’s no wonder it’s an UNESCO World Heritage site.
As my energy levels were dropping below a safe operating range, it was time to call it a day and get in some rest to try and complete this recovery.
Despite the fact that we feel like we just got hit by a bullet train, it still feels great to be back in Japan!! This time however we are on our own, and don’t have our friend Noah to help us navigate the train system. The Narita express airport train is a no-brainer. But once we arrived at our station in Tokyo, it was a whole other story. There are two different stations on the same block, and in one station there are about 4 floors of platforms and umpteen-thousand different lines. Maybe it was just that we weren’t operating at 100% but we spent over an hour trying to figure out how to get to our hotel that wasn’t even that far away. We made every rookie mistake in the book. Buying the wrong tickets. Almost getting on the wrong train. Walking down the wrong stairs. Second guessing ourselves. Running out of money for the right tickets. Oh yeah. Good times.
Eventually after trying to track down an ATM that would accept our foreign cards, we wandered into a hotel to ask for help and ended up just hailing a cab. Turns out we could have walked there from the train station.
In fact… later that night we practically DID walk there, and back. Some of our Japanese friends met us at our hotel, and against our better judgment convinced us to grab some dinner and beeru’s at our favorite yakitori restaurant. We had a great time catching up with them over some great food. Somehow, sitting and laughing with close friends with some warm food in our bellies made the whole 10 hour trip (from a country that is only 2 hours away by plane) all worth it, and all our troubles and stress just melted away.
